A unifying theme

Time was the New England Mobile Book Fair, over 30,000 square feet of books in Newton Highlands, was organized not by category but by publisher. It didn’t make for easy browsing, but it was a system that lit up the brain of Sumanth Prabhaker, a Northampton editor who runs Madras Press, a publishing house that puts out books of individual short stories, including work by Lydia Davis, Kelly Link, Donald Barthelme, and David Foster Wallace. “I loved seeing all the same-looking spines in a row like that and thinking about what they said, together, about the minds that produced them,’’ he explains.

It inspired Prabhaker to start thinking about creating a magazine, gathering writers and artists under a single thematic tent. The result is the Slow Reader, which will make its debut on Dec. 1.

The first issue collects stories, essays, poems, illustrations, and some in-betweens that center around novelist Haruki Murakami. A poem by Raymond Carver talks of tea with Murakami and getting hit in the ear with a snowball; the Murakami menu from Nodoguro in Portland, Ore., includes Norwegian Wood (seared Japanese eggplant, bonito, ginger, and red miso) and Kafka on the Shore (sea bream sashimi with citrus skin salad and pepper); Aimee Bender writes of what it is to trust an artist, and the experience, when reading Murakami, of having “gone somewhere new, a metaphysical spelunking.’’ There are also contributions by Jesse Ball, Rivka Galchen, Chris Ware, Yoko Ogawa, Etgar Keret, and others.

Prabhaker says future issues will cluster around M.F.K. Fisher, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Patricia Highsmith.

Poetry collection hits close to home

Nixes Mate is a tiny island in Boston Harbor. It’s a navigational hazard. The body of one executed pirate was famously left dangling there to serve as a warning to other potential pirates and mutineers. It’s the spirit of this island that gives name to a new press and literary magazine based in Allston. Nixes Mate put out its first issue this fall, and its debut title, a book of poetry called “On Broad Sound’’ by Rusty Barnes, comes out this Thursday. It’s a collection of poems about Revere Beach, greasy food and fog, tool belts, Budweiser, Suffolk Downs, Torretta’s Bakery, studded with moments of pain and loneliness and grace.

Michael McInnis, one of the Nixes Mate editors, who ran the bookstore Primal Plunge in Allston in the 1980s, published a punk zine while he was in the Navy. Off the seas and back in Boston working at a frame store, he encountered other zine people; they gathered together and created the Small Press Alliance to organize and pool resources. “It came to an end when one of the publisher’s boyfriends attacked her at one of our meetings,’’ said McInnis over the phone from Brooklyn where he was helping build bookshelves for a new underground bookstore opening in Williamsburg. “I had to beat him up. He ended up biting me. That was sort of how things went back then.’’

He sees Nixes Mate as an extension of the energy from that scene. “Especially in the Trump days, the best way to fight is to create, create, create.’’

Coming Out

“Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin’’ translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf)

“When We Rise: My Life in the Movement’’ by Cleve Jones (Hachette)

“Dance on the Volcano’’ by Marie Vieux-Chauvet, translated from the French by Kaiama L. Glover (Archipelago)

Pick of the week

Dora Truong of Books on the Square in Providence recommends “Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders’’ by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, and Ella Morton (Workman): “Do you know somebody who is fascinated by the unusual? The book is helpfully broken down into regions where you can see the unusual objects and places for yourself. The information is clear and concise. In short a fun book to look at whatever your mood.’’

Nina MacLaughlin is the author of “Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter’’ and can be reached at nmaclaughlin@gmail.com.